The year 1910 was marked by Halley's comet. An unprecedented phenomenon was expected: our planet, due to the immutable laws of celestial mechanics, had to collide with the tail of a comet.
Astronomers, however, assured that the collision does not threaten anyone, there will not even be a collision, but there will be a passage: the comet's tail is visible nothing, the concentration of matter in it is so scanty that the most accurate instruments are unlikely to detect changes in the composition of the earth's atmosphere.
However, not everyone shared the optimism of scientists: it has long been believed that large comets portend wars, pestilence, earthquakes and other misfortunes. We remembered the extinct dinosaurs, the Flood, the Egyptian executions. Many educated and enlightened people did not exclude the possibility that comets still affect our lives. Yes, the comet's tail is made of rarefied gas, but what gas? What if it is poisonous, and so poisonous that even the smallest impurities will have a detrimental effect on living beings?
In May, the excitement peaked. Enterprising people urged to urgently insure their lives and property at reduced rates from the consequences of monstrous cataclysms inevitable in the collision of celestial bodies. In the North American United States, the Comet pills were popular: the manufacturer ensured that people taking the pills could have absolutely no fear of cometary gas poisoning. Queues lined up at the pharmacies behind the Kometa. Competitors have released "Protective" pills, superior in strength to their known counterparts.
And the pills did not fail: when on May 19 the Earth entered the gas plume of Halley's comet, none of those who took the "Comet" or "Protective" were not injured. However, those who did not swallow any pills did not suffer either. Scientists were right, the instruments did not detect changes in the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere. Life went on, a calm and serene life. Four years were left before the shot in Sarajevo …
The famous French epidemiologist Alexander Lurie is sure: it was then, in 1910, that the seeds of world war were brought to Earth!
Infections are different. In some, the latent incubation period lasts hours, in others days. But there is a whole group of so-called slow infections. Infection occurs imperceptibly, for many months, or even years, the affected person feels completely healthy. For example, leprosy (leprosy) can appear ten or twenty years after the ingestion of Hansen's sticks into the body of the unfortunate. Another example is typhus. Having recovered from it, the person returns to normal life.
Promotional video:
It would seem that the disease has been overcome, but sometimes, many years later, typhus returns under the guise of Brill's disease. Finally, the level of science sometimes simply does not allow detecting the presence of an infection: it is assumed that people suffered from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, AIDS, long before the discovery of the virus.
The possibilities of science a hundred years ago were immeasurably less than they are now, and the virus carried by Halley's comet to Earth went unnoticed. Although Lurie does not insist on the virus: it is possible that the infection was of a prion nature. Prions, a special kind of protein structure, are able to withstand heating up to hundreds of degrees, are insensitive to cosmic cold. Once in the human body, they cause mysterious, still poorly understood disease processes.
The cometary virus was modest at first. And later, in the midst of the process, few people realized the very fact of the pandemic.
The higher nervous activity of a healthy person is characterized by a certain balance of excitation and inhibition processes. A normal person is endowed with common sense, prudence, and balance. The virus shook the balance, hitting the braking system. The man began to look like a car with faulty brakes. Worst of all, it did not happen to an individual person, but to all of humanity.
The pace of life has increased. The mind, freed from the brakes, opened up hitherto unknown areas of knowledge with incredible speed. The latest inventions have completely transformed the world. They had invented before, but always the resistance of the inert masses of society required enormous efforts to implement a discovery or invention. Many discoveries remained unclaimed, they were forgotten. In the twentieth century, mankind eagerly utilized the inventive idea, embodying it in a metal or chemical compound.
Common sense and morals were dealt a crushing blow. The beginning of the First World War is explained by the clash of interests of the powers, the internal contradictions of capitalist society, and the intrigues of secret structures.
In fact, everyone, from peasants to emperors, lost their "brakes", which was a manifestation of the infectious process. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand provoked a completely inadequate response: the leading world powers, disdaining their own interests, plunged into the abyss of a world war.
The world war was strikingly different from all previous wars. Not only and somewhat technical progress has changed it. The unprecedented fierceness of many months of battles, "death mills" were grinding millions of people without any sense, even from a military point of view. The collapse of the great empires, the insane civil war in Russia was not a historical necessity, but a consequence of the disturbance of the “excitement-inhibition” balance among a critical mass of the population of the Eastern Hemisphere.
Why the hemisphere and not the whole world? Lurie believes that this fact speaks in favor of his hypothesis: during its passage through the virus-rich section of the comet's tail, the Earth collided with it precisely in the eastern hemisphere.
The Second World War was a kind of Brill's disease, many historians interpret the first and second wars as a single process. And here the already frankly insane ideas of Hitler and his allies are striking. The countries of the Western Hemisphere, as before, are leading the war rationally and pragmatically - as an example, one can recall the constant postponement of the opening of the second front.
Now, according to Lurie, it is necessary to decide whether humanity has recovered, whether it has acquired a stable immunity to the "brake loss syndrome" or whether a new surge of insanity awaits us. To confirm the hypothesis, it is necessary to find the virus itself, but we do not know what, in fact, to look for: the virus can be inserted into the genome and considered its natural part.
Therefore, the project of a space expedition looks much more promising, which will collect samples of cometary matter, deliver them to Earth, and already here, in the best laboratories, they will decide whether there is life in Space and what it means for humanity.
Solomon NAFFERT